Why you need an iPad

3. Best device for quickly checking something online

The half-a-bottle-of-red-wine-down knowitall has ruled too long at our dinner parties. He can sit in his chair and expound on something or other, secure in the knowledge that you’re just too full to jump up, run in to the study, boot the PC, load up the browser, type in the URL… agh.

With an iPad, you grab it, tap it, and within seconds have a whole range of articles refuting your guest’s claim that the QWERTY keyboard is laid out that way to slow typists down (It’s to split commonly occurring letter pairs in English – a subtle but vital difference!).

Of course this fast online experience goes further. Check the weather in an app with a single tap. Check a recipe in the same way. Go through the kitchen cupboards with the iPad in one hand, tapping your grocery order into a supermarket app.

Checking movie times is pretty good too. Do people still go to the movies, in this age of 65 inch LCDs and HD streaming?

2. One of the best video-call devices

Almost every sci-fi writer predicted videophones, but almost none of them predicted that video calling would piggyback on non-phone devices and be both incredibly easy and incredibly cheap.

For the fraction-of-a-cent-per-MB in data costs of the link to another Skype user, you and your best buddy in Stockholm can chat away for hours, with reasonable image quality, on a screen that shows faces only a little smaller than if you were at normal conversational distance.

Video calling apps on the iPad are extremely easy to use: enter your password, tap a contact. Because there’s only two cameras (front and back) and one microphone, there are none of those video and audio problems you can get on notebook PCs.

And the super-streamlined interface is actually easier to use than a regular telephone – you don’t even have to remember any numbers!

1. It’s the easiest to use

You might think this a rather subjective point. You might be a whiz on Android’s latest iteration, the web-darling Ice Cream Sandwich. But in Steve Job’s biography, there’s an anecdote of a six year-old boy in a developing nation, who has never seen a computer before, let alone an iPad, picking one up and playing around with the camera on it.

Yes: the iPad is a computer so simple, even a human can use it.

The iPad’s single greatest contribution to information technology is that it takes the ‘whuh?’ out of computers. See a symbol, tap it, something happens. That’s the whole exercise. You can go more in-depth if you want, tweak your settings, hack and jailbreak, but at the end of the day you can do a factory restore, hand it to your 80 year old grandmother and have her reading the newspaper in less than five minutes.

Apple has really nailed the user interface on iPad – at least where basic, everyday use is concerned. The iPad is, in many ways, the first computer that’s more like a TV – you switch it on and use it, and everyone knows how. You don’t need ‘an iPad guy’ on standby to ‘get your emails back’ or fix a mouse.

If you’ve got things you need to do online, and you don’t like messing around with computers, then you need an iPad.